I love Office 2008. It was way better then 04 (excluding Macros) and 2011 is gonna fix that! All the people saying you lose formatting or something - not true, use Office 08 at home and 07 at school, as long as you save as docx you are good to go. Open office does not save in docx (i think, its been a while since I used it though). Once we got our Macros back with 2011 productivity on mac is gonna be on par with PC. iWork doesn't come close (except for keynote). Can't wait.
Agreed. Years ago, there were monitors that swiveled into portrait mode for word processing.
Do they still make such things?
Ha ... I bought one of those right before OS X came out, and the company never released an OS X driver, and I never even got to use the swivel feature. No idea if anyone still makes them, though.
Frankly, I don't much care what Office 2011 looks like, though speaking as the author of a book on using Word for onscreen editing on both Windows and Mac platforms, it would make my life enormously easier if they finally standardized the interface. It would cut my documentation time by more than half, and trim the book length by (crude estimate) about 10%.
What I really care about is whether the software works. Word 2008 is ridiculously slow, even on a previous generation MacBook Pro. It hesitates trying to open even simple documents, staggers every time I copy a line or two to the clipboard, and takes forever to launch Applescripts. Plus, it doesn't run macros, and something about its clipboard doesn't work with Dreamweaver (though I blame Adobe for this; DW MX 2004 is a botch job).
Microsoft should forget about the bells and whistles and give me software I can actually use. Nowadays, I use Word 2003 (under Parallels) for all my paying work, and only use Word 2008 for basic writing or when I'm too impatient to launch Parallels. Microsoft should be ashamed that Word 2003 is so much faster, bug-free, and functional than the version of Word (2008) released more than 5 years later for the Mac.
Man, I hate that ribbon concept. When I first learned to use a Mac, one of the first concepts was the menu at the top of the screen. It's neatly organized by category and you can always find the command you're looking for, and see the scope of the application's functionality, by glancing through a few of the menus. This approach encourages you to think rationally about the task you're trying to accomplish, what other tasks it's related to, and therefore where its command is located.
Ribbons, on the other hand, try to just put in front of you whatever the application thinks you might want to do, without regard for any relationships or hierarchy. So rather than using some modest cognitive power to find what you're looking for, you're at the mercy of the program because if what you want isn't there, there's no reliable way to find it. I feel like that's the opposite of Apple's software principle -- rather than empowering users, it makes them feel helpless.
It's the same design principle as Facebook. That site has no consistent navigational structure, it's just like "here's some friends," "here's some news items," "here's some other stuff." "When you reload the page it will all change." I can visit the site and have fun randomly clicking around, but if I want to find a specific piece of information, I usually end up going in circles.
Meanwhile, I'm a web developer and I see more and more users coming to my sites and completely ignoring the MENU which clearly lays out the site structure, and having no idea what to do if whatever they happen to be looking for isn't magically placed in front of them. I truly believe that computer literacy is decreasing and that the Microsoft/Facebook approach to interface design is the biggest culprit.
Does anyone know if the new version of Office will be able to offer support for key commands identical to / very similar to those offered on Windows. As a spreadsheet cruncher, the biggest downside to Excel for Mac is that so many of the functions / formatting that can be accomplished via key commands on Windows require using the mouse on a Mac.
You can attach your own keystrokes to any Office command through the "Customize" command, under the Tools menu. Open this dialog, click the "Keyboard" button, and then navigate to whatever command you want to create a keyboard shortcut.
What you can't do, which is Microsoft's fault for following Apple's UI guidelines, is navigate the menus with simple keystrokes. In WinWord, you can get to any just about any menu command in 2 or 3 keystrokes: Alt plus the menu's underlined letter, then the underlined letter for the menu option. The closest you can come to this on the Mac is activating the menus (I believe Control+F2 by default), then scrolling with the arrow keys, which is slowww... I'd love to see the Alt-key navigation added to MacWord, at least as an option.
iWork is as worse as Microsoft in what is concerne support to RTL writting, and it is not funny that Apple ignore this market as well. Ignore or discriminate.
I wish someone could explain to Microsoft that sometimes the best feature to give users is the ability to HIDE controls for features that they don't need.
I am a very happy Macbook, iPad, iPhone, and AppleTV user, but I also have to keep a JOB to pay for the fun stuff, and that means Word. Unfortunately, the 7,999 features of Word that I don't use get in the way of the three features that I DO use.
I would be perfectly content with Word 2008 if I could just get rid of every button, option, ribbon, element bar, and any other clickable spot that I don't need so that I could have more screen real estate within which to create a damn document!
Does anybody in Redmond realize that most documents are portrait and most displays are landscape? It just seems like such an obvious and easy problem to fix...
Oh well. Maybe in version 2015 we will get a word processor that just gets out of the way.
The subdued the coloring, that's predominantly all they did. The remainder of their UI elements is still as excessive as always, there are enough divider lines and bars and gaps to build a 1980's Cadillac.
How Office users tolerate this I will never know? Oh that's right - they're forced to tolerate it.
Some. A friend just bought two dell 19" or 20" that do that. Flipped them up and put them side by side and did a split screen across them Why not just buy one big monitor? That setup is dirt cheap.
To distracting for my taste.
Good points. I was wondering why the format died. One big 16x9 monitor makes a lot more sense.
Meanwhile, Apple has established a standard Toolbar user interface for apps in Mac OS X, which allows users to customize the buttons they use, present them with or without text labels, and depict icons in large or small sizes. The company has also standardized its own apps to make heavy use of Inspector palettes. Within iWork, Apple has also introduced the Format Bar as a way to optionally present a contextually relevant strip of controls under the standard Toolbar.
That's because Cocoa and Openstep were designed with the main view to be minimal in clutter and your inspectors [with short-cut key combos] to be your area to customize when you need it.
Forgive me, but today's software reviews resemble nothing so much as précis of press releases. Writers now seem to automatically accept the product on its on terms, making significant criticism unlikely. Imagine architectural criticism where the writer focused on the fountain in the lobby, barely mentioning the site of the building, its relation to the surrounding landscape, or available of transportation.
To me, the most important aspect of any application is how well it integrates with the OS and other applications I'm already using. Microsoft and Adobe are notorious for arrogant ghetto thinking, fixing what isn't broken and inventing their own, tediously special, product-centric ways to accomplish common tasks. Both companies try to gain market share by domination rather than cooperation, and using the products of either entails and endless series of unnecessary "my way or the high way" compromises.
For example, OS X offers a common interface for accessing fonts. It allows the user to keep several thousand active all the time without clutter or confusion. Both MS and Adobe products fail to implement this, instead supplying a useless, monolithic menu from the Dawn of GUI. Ditto color pickers, spelling dictionaries, toolbar customization, and a host of similar issues. What's most important about such features is their consistency. Even if a new approach is demonstrably superior, it has to be enormously so to justify departing from a standard.
More generally, neither MS nor Adobe every met a feature they could resist, and the resultant interface is always reminiscent of some nouveau riche Long Island party girl in clown makeup who, unable to pick a coherent outfit, just wore everything in the closet 'cause Daddy said it's good marketing. The resulting user experience is like cooking in a kitchen where the refrigerator is 100 meters from the stove, with the intervening space occupied by an obstacle course of winking, blinking, chirping children's toys.
Adding a new app to one's virtual environment is like adopting a new family member. But the analogy fails in that adopting an autistic child would be a supreme act of selfless charity, but acquiring apps that can't communicate, integrate, and blend well with the whole is merely stupid.
Forgive me, but today's software reviews resemble nothing so much as précis of press releases. Writers now seem to automatically accept the product on its on terms, making significant criticism unlikely. Imagine architectural criticism where the writer focused on the fountain in the lobby, barely mentioning the site of the building, its relation to the surrounding landscape, or available of transportation.
To me, the most important aspect of any application is how well it integrates with the OS and other applications I'm already using. Microsoft and Adobe are notorious for arrogant ghetto thinking, fixing what isn't broken and inventing their own, tediously special, product-centric ways to accomplish common tasks. Both companies try to gain market share by domination rather than cooperation, and using the products of either entails and endless series of unnecessary "my way or the high way" compromises.
For example, OS X offers a common interface for accessing fonts. It allows the user to keep several thousand active all the time without clutter or confusion. Both MS and Adobe products fail to implement this, instead supplying a useless, monolithic menu from the Dawn of GUI. Ditto color pickers, spelling dictionaries, toolbar customization, and a host of similar issues. What's most important about such features is their consistency. Even if a new approach is demonstrably superior, it has to be enormously so to justify departing from a standard.
More generally, neither MS nor Adobe every met a feature they could resist, and the resultant interface is always reminiscent of some nouveau riche Long Island party girl in clown makeup who, unable to pick a coherent outfit, just wore everything in the closet 'cause Daddy said it's good marketing. The resulting user experience is like cooking in a kitchen where the refrigerator is 100 meters from the stove, with the intervening space occupied by an obstacle course of winking, blinking, chirping children's toys.
Adding a new app to one's virtual environment is like adopting a new family member. But the analogy fails in that adopting an autistic child would be a supreme act of selfless charity, but acquiring apps that can't communicate, integrate, and blend well with the whole is merely stupid.
I use MS Word to create CVs, save as PDF and then email them. I don't need Office for work so I'd like to use iWork 2009 instead.
Any risks of switching over? Anything I should know about? I don't need to open Word docs but if I do can iWork open them?
Pages supported Word's DOCX format before Word for Macintosh did. However, that doesn't mean your documents will open flawlessly. Many of Word's features are not supported in Pages (forms is an obvious one, but there are plenty of formatting options unsupported). One of the nice things about the iWork apps is that there is an error viewer that will immediately show incompatibilities--both when importing Office documents (showing how the unsupported conversion was handled) and when exporting iWork documents to Office formats (also showing how the incompatibility was handled).
Another nice feature in iWork: the error viewer will also show uninstalled fonts being used, and allow you to substitute.
Since the introduction of the ribbon, Office has become very pleasant to use. Since my primary machine is a Mac, I bought iWorks along with Snow Leopard (the "Mac Box") and tried to use it everyday (especially KeyNote), but after one month I came back to the VMWare + Office 2007 (now 2010) solution.
Of course, I tried the Office suite on the Mac, I even bought it. Office 2008 is ugly, buggy, inconvenient to use and anyway does not include a lot lot of functionalities that the Windows Version has. And did I say it was ugly ? And the 2011 version does not look better so far (but I will try it as soon as possible)
I mean, I can not forgive MS for the crappy level of their Mac suite, while the Windows version is so neat. They must do that in purpose; I can picture their team meeting: "you should add some bug here, and I think this widget is a bit too polished: ask you 6-year-old child to re-design it".
Comments
Agreed. Years ago, there were monitors that swiveled into portrait mode for word processing.
Do they still make such things?
Ha ... I bought one of those right before OS X came out, and the company never released an OS X driver, and I never even got to use the swivel feature. No idea if anyone still makes them, though.
What I really care about is whether the software works. Word 2008 is ridiculously slow, even on a previous generation MacBook Pro. It hesitates trying to open even simple documents, staggers every time I copy a line or two to the clipboard, and takes forever to launch Applescripts. Plus, it doesn't run macros, and something about its clipboard doesn't work with Dreamweaver (though I blame Adobe for this; DW MX 2004 is a botch job).
Microsoft should forget about the bells and whistles and give me software I can actually use. Nowadays, I use Word 2003 (under Parallels) for all my paying work, and only use Word 2008 for basic writing or when I'm too impatient to launch Parallels. Microsoft should be ashamed that Word 2003 is so much faster, bug-free, and functional than the version of Word (2008) released more than 5 years later for the Mac.
Ribbons, on the other hand, try to just put in front of you whatever the application thinks you might want to do, without regard for any relationships or hierarchy. So rather than using some modest cognitive power to find what you're looking for, you're at the mercy of the program because if what you want isn't there, there's no reliable way to find it. I feel like that's the opposite of Apple's software principle -- rather than empowering users, it makes them feel helpless.
It's the same design principle as Facebook. That site has no consistent navigational structure, it's just like "here's some friends," "here's some news items," "here's some other stuff." "When you reload the page it will all change." I can visit the site and have fun randomly clicking around, but if I want to find a specific piece of information, I usually end up going in circles.
Meanwhile, I'm a web developer and I see more and more users coming to my sites and completely ignoring the MENU which clearly lays out the site structure, and having no idea what to do if whatever they happen to be looking for isn't magically placed in front of them. I truly believe that computer literacy is decreasing and that the Microsoft/Facebook approach to interface design is the biggest culprit.
Argh!!!
Does anyone know if the new version of Office will be able to offer support for key commands identical to / very similar to those offered on Windows. As a spreadsheet cruncher, the biggest downside to Excel for Mac is that so many of the functions / formatting that can be accomplished via key commands on Windows require using the mouse on a Mac.
You can attach your own keystrokes to any Office command through the "Customize" command, under the Tools menu. Open this dialog, click the "Keyboard" button, and then navigate to whatever command you want to create a keyboard shortcut.
What you can't do, which is Microsoft's fault for following Apple's UI guidelines, is navigate the menus with simple keystrokes. In WinWord, you can get to any just about any menu command in 2 or 3 keystrokes: Alt plus the menu's underlined letter, then the underlined letter for the menu option. The closest you can come to this on the Mac is activating the menus (I believe Control+F2 by default), then scrolling with the arrow keys, which is slowww... I'd love to see the Alt-key navigation added to MacWord, at least as an option.
Word:
Function within some notion of logic.
Excel:
Function, period.
iWork is all you need.
iWork is as worse as Microsoft in what is concerne support to RTL writting, and it is not funny that Apple ignore this market as well. Ignore or discriminate.
I am a very happy Macbook, iPad, iPhone, and AppleTV user, but I also have to keep a JOB to pay for the fun stuff, and that means Word. Unfortunately, the 7,999 features of Word that I don't use get in the way of the three features that I DO use.
I would be perfectly content with Word 2008 if I could just get rid of every button, option, ribbon, element bar, and any other clickable spot that I don't need so that I could have more screen real estate within which to create a damn document!
Does anybody in Redmond realize that most documents are portrait and most displays are landscape? It just seems like such an obvious and easy problem to fix...
Oh well. Maybe in version 2015 we will get a word processor that just gets out of the way.
How Office users tolerate this I will never know? Oh that's right - they're forced to tolerate it.
Some. A friend just bought two dell 19" or 20" that do that. Flipped them up and put them side by side and did a split screen across them Why not just buy one big monitor? That setup is dirt cheap.
To distracting for my taste.
Good points. I was wondering why the format died. One big 16x9 monitor makes a lot more sense.
Meanwhile, Apple has established a standard Toolbar user interface for apps in Mac OS X, which allows users to customize the buttons they use, present them with or without text labels, and depict icons in large or small sizes. The company has also standardized its own apps to make heavy use of Inspector palettes. Within iWork, Apple has also introduced the Format Bar as a way to optionally present a contextually relevant strip of controls under the standard Toolbar.
That's because Cocoa and Openstep were designed with the main view to be minimal in clutter and your inspectors [with short-cut key combos] to be your area to customize when you need it.
To me, the most important aspect of any application is how well it integrates with the OS and other applications I'm already using. Microsoft and Adobe are notorious for arrogant ghetto thinking, fixing what isn't broken and inventing their own, tediously special, product-centric ways to accomplish common tasks. Both companies try to gain market share by domination rather than cooperation, and using the products of either entails and endless series of unnecessary "my way or the high way" compromises.
For example, OS X offers a common interface for accessing fonts. It allows the user to keep several thousand active all the time without clutter or confusion. Both MS and Adobe products fail to implement this, instead supplying a useless, monolithic menu from the Dawn of GUI. Ditto color pickers, spelling dictionaries, toolbar customization, and a host of similar issues. What's most important about such features is their consistency. Even if a new approach is demonstrably superior, it has to be enormously so to justify departing from a standard.
More generally, neither MS nor Adobe every met a feature they could resist, and the resultant interface is always reminiscent of some nouveau riche Long Island party girl in clown makeup who, unable to pick a coherent outfit, just wore everything in the closet 'cause Daddy said it's good marketing. The resulting user experience is like cooking in a kitchen where the refrigerator is 100 meters from the stove, with the intervening space occupied by an obstacle course of winking, blinking, chirping children's toys.
Adding a new app to one's virtual environment is like adopting a new family member. But the analogy fails in that adopting an autistic child would be a supreme act of selfless charity, but acquiring apps that can't communicate, integrate, and blend well with the whole is merely stupid.
Microsoft and Adobe are notorious for...inventing their own, tediously special, product-centric ways to accomplish common tasks.
Lots of Windows users feel exactly that way about iTunes.
Forgive me, but today's software reviews resemble nothing so much as précis of press releases. Writers now seem to automatically accept the product on its on terms, making significant criticism unlikely. Imagine architectural criticism where the writer focused on the fountain in the lobby, barely mentioning the site of the building, its relation to the surrounding landscape, or available of transportation.
To me, the most important aspect of any application is how well it integrates with the OS and other applications I'm already using. Microsoft and Adobe are notorious for arrogant ghetto thinking, fixing what isn't broken and inventing their own, tediously special, product-centric ways to accomplish common tasks. Both companies try to gain market share by domination rather than cooperation, and using the products of either entails and endless series of unnecessary "my way or the high way" compromises.
For example, OS X offers a common interface for accessing fonts. It allows the user to keep several thousand active all the time without clutter or confusion. Both MS and Adobe products fail to implement this, instead supplying a useless, monolithic menu from the Dawn of GUI. Ditto color pickers, spelling dictionaries, toolbar customization, and a host of similar issues. What's most important about such features is their consistency. Even if a new approach is demonstrably superior, it has to be enormously so to justify departing from a standard.
More generally, neither MS nor Adobe every met a feature they could resist, and the resultant interface is always reminiscent of some nouveau riche Long Island party girl in clown makeup who, unable to pick a coherent outfit, just wore everything in the closet 'cause Daddy said it's good marketing. The resulting user experience is like cooking in a kitchen where the refrigerator is 100 meters from the stove, with the intervening space occupied by an obstacle course of winking, blinking, chirping children's toys.
Adding a new app to one's virtual environment is like adopting a new family member. But the analogy fails in that adopting an autistic child would be a supreme act of selfless charity, but acquiring apps that can't communicate, integrate, and blend well with the whole is merely stupid.
Best. Post. Ever.
When is Micro$ucks ever going to replace that floppy disc "save" icon???
Well I don't think of them as $ucks, but you're right. When are they going to update that icon? Nostalgia maybe?
Oh, and nice Star Wars reference in the title, AI.
Road to Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac: A New Hope
Are you sure this isn't
Road to Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac: The Empire Strikes Back
Any risks of switching over? Anything I should know about? I don't need to open Word docs but if I do can iWork open them?
I use MS Word to create CVs, save as PDF and then email them. I don't need Office for work so I'd like to use iWork 2009 instead.
Any risks of switching over? Anything I should know about? I don't need to open Word docs but if I do can iWork open them?
Pages supported Word's DOCX format before Word for Macintosh did. However, that doesn't mean your documents will open flawlessly. Many of Word's features are not supported in Pages (forms is an obvious one, but there are plenty of formatting options unsupported). One of the nice things about the iWork apps is that there is an error viewer that will immediately show incompatibilities--both when importing Office documents (showing how the unsupported conversion was handled) and when exporting iWork documents to Office formats (also showing how the incompatibility was handled).
Another nice feature in iWork: the error viewer will also show uninstalled fonts being used, and allow you to substitute.
Of course, I tried the Office suite on the Mac, I even bought it. Office 2008 is ugly, buggy, inconvenient to use and anyway does not include a lot lot of functionalities that the Windows Version has. And did I say it was ugly ? And the 2011 version does not look better so far (but I will try it as soon as possible)
I mean, I can not forgive MS for the crappy level of their Mac suite, while the Windows version is so neat. They must do that in purpose; I can picture their team meeting: "you should add some bug here, and I think this widget is a bit too polished: ask you 6-year-old child to re-design it".